was running about N.E., 20 to 30 feet wide, as deep as to my
knee, and piercing cold. I tried to follow it down, and keep
the run of its direction and my paces; but when I was wading
to the knees and the waist in mud, poison brush, and rotted
wood, bound hand and foot in lianas, shovelled
unceremoniously off the one shore and driven to try my luck
upon the other - I saw I should have hard enough work to get
my body down, if my mind rested. It was a damnable walk;
certainly not half a mile as the crow flies, but a real
bucketer for hardship. Once I had to pass the stream where
it flowed between banks about three feet high. To get the
easier down, I swung myself by a wild-cocoanut - (so called,
it bears bunches of scarlet nutlets) - which grew upon the
brink. As I so swung, I received a crack on the head that
knocked me all abroad. Impossible to guess what tree had
taken a shy at me. So many towered above, one over the
other, and the missile, whatever it was, dropped in the
stream and was gone before I had recovered my wits. (I
scarce know what I write, so hideous a Niagara of rain roars,
shouts, and demonizes on the iron roof - it is pitch dark too
- the lamp lit at 5!) It was a blessed thing when I struck
my own road; and I got home, neat for lunch time, one of the
most wonderful mud statues ever witnessed. In the afternoon
I tried again, going up the other path by the garden, but was
early drowned out; came home, plotted out what I had done,
and then wrote this truck to you.

Fanny has been quite ill with ear-ache. She won't go, hating
the sea at this wild season; I don't like to leave her; so it
drones on, steamer after steamer, and I guess it'll end by no